The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy pdf

Ernst Cassirer (1874 - 1945) was a German philosopher and historian of philosophy who belonged to the so-called Marburg School of "neo-Kantian philosophy". He is best known as the most prominent commentator of Kantian critical philosophy in the twentieth century. He left Germany in 1933, and died in New York. Among his most famous works are: “Essence and Function” (1910), “Freedom and Form” (1916), “Philosophy of Symbolic Forms” (1923 - 1929), “Myth and the State” (1942), “Symbol, Myth and Culture” (1979), “Language and Myth.” (1925).

The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy pdf by Ernst Cassirer

“A landmark in the history of Renaissance thought.” — Jaroslav Pelikan.
This provocative volume, probably the single most important interpretive work on the philosophical thought of the Renaissance, has long been regarded as a classic in its field. It is considered an exceptionally insightful investigation of how the Renaissance spirit fundamentally questioned and undermined medieval thought.
In examining the changes brewing in the early stages of the Renaissance, the author reveals immense erudition and artistic insight as he perceptively describes the interdependence of philosophy, language, art, and science, considers at length the recognition of the consciousness of the individual self, and discusses the great thinkers of the period—from Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo to Pico della Mirandola and Giordano Bruno.
Among the major topics covered are the work of Nicholas Cusanus, a fifteenth-century philosopher and scholar who stressed the incomplete nature of man’s knowledge of God and the universe; freedom and necessity in the philosophy of the Renaissance; and the subject-object problem in the philosophy of the Renaissance.
Among the most significant German works on the Renaissance produced in the twentieth century, this volume, reprinted here in a superb English-language version, “should be widely used by students of the various literatures, of political theory, of the history of religion and Reformation thought, and of the history of science, as well as by those concerned with intellectual history in general.” — John Herman Randall, Jr.